No tolerance from Christian bullies, so why tolerance toward them?

Non-believers like myself are forever being admonished to have "tolerance" for religious beliefs and those who espouse them. Frankly, I'm just about fed up with it, and I have the current crop of American fundamentalist Christian bullies to thank.

It must now be obvious to all that "tolerance" isn't in the fundamentalist vocabulary. Why do we continue to placate them, in the name of tolerance, when doing so is a one-way street to our being subjugated by them?

You stand up to a bully and crack him hard across the nose, you don't stand there simpering about how much respect you have for his belief that God told him to abuse you.

Tolerance does not mean spinelessness.

NGU.

That's not to say you should eat any shit they shovel at you. Live and let live, sure...allow yourself to be brutalized or insulted, no.

Because those who believe are good and righteous, and we who do not are evil. We're programmed to think the Godly ones are somehow better than we non-believers are. It's the mental equivalent to kicking a nun. :shrug:

Not saying it's right, and in fact it's totally *not* right...but that's how I see it.

I'd kick a nun in the kneecaps, and I would not think twice about it.
Well, not just any nun, but those nuns that beat my ass in elementary school in the sixties.
Those bitches deserve to get a visit from Joe Pesci with a ball peen hammer.
They were vicious and they were borderline sadistic.
Why else take a nine year old boy, and smack his knuckles with a brass ruler?

;)

I also know many people who would line up behind you. I'm unfortunatley not very good at expressing this opinion (I've tried before) so please don't assume I'm in any way pro-nun. :D

I know what I'm trying to say, but can't seem to make it come out right. :(

Oppressors get no tolerance from me. Period.

while I tend to have the knee-jerk reaction of no tolerance for them, either...try reading this article for a different perspective from the Unitarian Universalist publication UUWorld.
See what you think.
I think some good points are made, but I still tend to agree with your thought of "give 'em hell!"

But I thought another perspective on this...from a liberal religious viewpoint, might be interesting.

http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/competingworldviewsoffundamentalistsreligiousliberals1716.shtml

From the article...(Click on above link for full article)

Like most religious liberals, we Unitarian Universalists imagine ourselves to be nice people. It is those in the Christian Right, we believe, who want to force their moral code on everyone else and use public resources to proselytize for their faith. We, on the other hand, believe in tolerance, free choice, and letting people be what they have to be. What’s so scary about that? If the rank-and-file of organizations like Focus on the Family or the Christian Coalition feel threatened by us, we think, it can only be because they have been duped by their unscrupulous leaders.

Not necessarily.

True, preachers of the Christian Right have said a lot of unfair things about liberals, both religious and political. But conservative Christian fears have not been created ex nihilo. As overstated as those fears may at times become, they have a basis, and we would do well to understand it.

Such a call for understanding, I realize, will sound to some like an invitation to surrender. Won’t opponents see our empathy as a sign of weakness and be encouraged to make even bigger demands on us? If they make to comparable effort to understand and accommodate us, won’t we be drawn into one-sided compromises that slide gradually towards capitulation? In the face of a hard and uncompromising opponent, we seem to have no choice other than to become hard and uncompromising too. Only one strategy seems to make sense: Give them hell.

But liberal religious traditions recognize understanding as a source of strength, not a sign of weakness. “Give them not hell,” advised Universalist pioneer John Murray, “but hope and courage.” What if he was on to something? If our traditions of wisdom, empathy, and respect are simply baggage in this struggle, then we are at a significant disadvantage. We must find a way to use these tools and not just lug them around until our situation improves.

except intolerance and hatred. When they learn to stop doing both, I will tolerate them 100%.

As someone stated here, there is a difference between tolerating someone who is different, and letting someone who actively hates people walk all over you. I know they try to use the same argument against us (like how secular Americans are attacking Christians), but it is not true. Most atheists and agnostics I know would be far quieter about religion if they did not feel pushed into a corner by religion so often.

My other favorite attack is to use scripture to point out their errors, and I am not a Christian even if I do think there are some excellent philosophical points to be made.

Christ stressed over and over that it is not for us to judge; it is for him.

We are supposed to turn the other cheek and be kind to our fellow humans and to take care of the weak and hungry.

If Christ can befriend whores and thieves and other "sinners", who are we to cast stones at anyone?

Sadly, they generally won't listen to me unless they are already the kind of Christian that I do embrace: the ones who already do accept others who are different. If anything the haters spout some crap about the Devil knowing his scripture, so it all becomes rather pointless and sad.

We don't like what they have to say, but they still have the right to say it, however hateful, intolerant and bigoted it is. We also have the right to speak and protest against what they have to say, and to say what we say against them.

they don't bother or affect me in the slightest, so why should I want to deal with them any more harshly than I would anyone else I disagreed with.

As far as their effect on politics or public policy goes, they are simply another group on another side of the issues. Far less powerful than your typical commercial lobbyist.

Most of them are all talk, and they have as much right to talk as I do, but I'll admit steps (legal ones, of course) may be necessary when some particularly vile action is planned.

What about the fallacious National/God attitude they champion?